Postcards from Travel Near and Far by Jia-Rui

Maybe I didn’t have a set of Multiples and I thought my parents were holding me back from being really in style. But a lot of the crap in my old room showed that I couldn’t really get away from some of the fads.

Fad 1: Cabbage Patch Kids and Popples

I’d say, except for the Cabbage Patch Kids and Popple, these stuffed animals could be in any grubby little kid’s room these days. I had three Cabbage Patch Kids that I adored: Adela, Lyda and Adam. I kept the adoption papers that came with them and the “one-year birthday” card the Cabbage Patch folks sent. You’ll notice there’s a poor man’s Cabbage Patch knock-off, too, on the upper right. And then there’s the green Popple, the Murphy bed of stuffed animals: the creature that folds into its own pouch. Remember how they even had their own TV show?

Fad 2: Trophies and Awards for Just Showing up

OK, I actually earned a few of these — I think I bowled a 135 in 5th grade to get a “High Score” trophy and the first year our high school had a girls’ volleyball team in 1994, we tied for first in our division. But then again, every year I did after-school bowling at elementary school, I got a trophy. Every year I played pee-wee soccer, I got a trophy. Every year I played in the band, I got a certificate of participation. And now what do I do with trophies? You can’t donate them because why would someone else want this awkwardly-shaped object with your name on it? They’re probably not even salvageable for the marble they’re screwed into. I was sad throwing these out, but I was actually even sadder when my dad threw away the trophies he won at company ping-pong and tennis tournaments and the plaques he got for a good job at work. It felt as if he was throwing away all the hard work he did at the office and on the courts. I joked with him, “Do you feel less important now?” He shrugged — there was no difference for him between the moment before and the moment after.

Fad 3: Velvet Party Dresses

That all-black dress is my senior prom dress. I even wore it in June because I loved velvet so much. The purple polka-dot dress is the first “party” dress I got as a 12-year-old. I think I wore it once, to a wedding. But man did I feel special matching it with a scrunchie and doing a Molly Ringwald-inspired dance.

Sigh. All of that is going now to Goodwill, where someone is going to find the right goods to make a banging 1980s Halloween get-up.

Today’s random bonus is drawings from my tween years. Glamour apparently meant crazy eye make-up, fingerless gloves, jumpsuits and side ponytails. This is how I really wanted to dress if my parents let me.

Today I attacked the book shelf where I kept old tapes and school papers. These mix tapes were the emotional currency of middle and high school in the late 80s through the 90s. Did any of us know then that the equipment to play them would be obsolete so soon? Here’s what I put on that very first mix tape:

So I’d have to date this to early 1988, given that Jodi Watley’s “Some Kind of Lover” and Tiffany’s “Could’ve Been so Beautiful” both came out in 1988. But I have to say I was moved to go find Whitney Houston’s “So Emotional” on Youtube, so here it is for your reminiscing pleasure: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YjSHbA6HQQ.

I’m pretty sure this mix came next, though it’s undated, too. (I guess my librarian need to catalog didn’t kick in yet.) This is the movement into what I’ll call the “mood” mixes.

Thorough Googling and radiocarbon dating put this one c. 1991. I was just another tween girl with a crush on the ABC lads (who were, I guess, a little younger than me, but so, so fresh). Watch this video for “Iesha”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDPIK7Fz_g4 (“We ate cereal …”). I know I discovered “American Pie” in 1991, when I first went to nerd camp (also known as CTY). This started my mini-fad of mixing the oldie-but-goodies with the new stuff.

This next mix is funny because the graphic I drew underneath is so early 90s. Also, I guess I was learning vocabulary words that made me feel deep.

And then, in 1993, I was 16 and feeling the full brunt of teenagehood:

I don’t know why Monty Python’s “I’m a Lumberjack” had any relationship to angst — I probably recorded it off the sound part of the TV, which was easiest to do at the beginning of a tape rather than somewhere in the middle. But, oh, how “Living in Oblivion,” “Wish You Were Here” and “Forever Young” stoke those smoldering adolescent coals of longing and frustration. This Anything Box video with a guy with Fido Dido hair makes me want to find my trench coat: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VI53G_D5Dbw.

And what were my friends listening to at this time? Well, my friend Shannon made me this mix:

As a bonus, I also include this picture that shows the teacher comments at the bottom of a book report I wrote about “Anne of Avonlea” (the sequel to “Anne of Green Gables”) when I was 12. I was breathlessly in love with Anne and Prince Edward Island at the time.

In case you can’t read it, the important part says, my report “is a bit verbose. You’re writing a book report, not another novel. Try to cut it down.” Well, I had enthusiasm anyway.

I’m here to clean out my old room.* I know I’ve been a packrat, so I’ve been looking forward to seeing what I’d squirreled away over the years. Today, the first day, I worked on the t-shirts. It’s amazing how quickly you remember exactly what you were doing when you wore these silkscreened pieces of cotton.

I mean, who can forget being a flutist in the 1989 incarnation of the All Cherry Hill Band in middle school (even if my name was spelled wrong)? (If you can’t remember if you were in this band, here’s a handy close-up.)

And then, of course, there was CTY — when I learned there were hundreds of nerds like me. I apparently even drew the t-shirt for our fiction-writing class in 1993. I can’t summon up any memory of the inside jokes on the back. The underwear organizer? The chair saying, “Hey man! Sit on my face!”?!

And then there was the jersey from “Powder Puff” rough-touch football when the junior girls played the senior girls. I played defensive end. But then as both Kiran and I were going for the quarterback and I lifted one of my arms to block the ball, I hit my elbow into her forehead and split the skin. Oops. At least we won.

I also found a t-shirt from camp where I learned how to ride a horse, kill mosquitoes with my bare hands and tread water in a lake in the pine barrens. Here’s where I learned ridiculous songs that started like, “Great green gobs of greasy grimy gopher guts …” It was only in retrospect later that I realized we were also singing a lot of religious songs about giving “God your glory glory.”

And then there was this jacket, mixed in among the t-shirts: the lacrosse jacket with the waterproof butt flap so you could sit on damp grass and stretch without getting dirty. I think I’ve kept it in part because I somehow think I’ll get back into organized sports activities that actually involve stretching on a damp field.

I remember taking this jacket with me to college and thinking I’d wear it all the time. Only, people were apparently so afraid of being associated with being fresh out of high school that no one wore their high school stuff. So this went back into the closet with the t-shirts.

Somehow it feels as if taking pictures of all these t-shirts lets me save something of the emotion behind them and put them in a plastic bag to give away to Goodwill. So long, shirts. May you find someone good in Bangkok to create some new memories with them.**

*While I technically didn’t grow up in this exact room, my parents moved the entire contents of my old bedroom to this house when they moved here in 2001.

**One time in Bangkok, I literally saw someone wearing a t-shirt that said CHESA (Cherry Hill East Soccer Association — the youth soccer club I played with). I guess this is where a lot of American t-shirts go to die?

I spent five days at Cagliari’s T Hotel for a science meeting and appreciated the modern amenities (wi-fi! a good restaurant! a bath tub! coffee breaks!). But at the end of the meeting, I was ready to get outside. Cagliari itself was unimpressive and we were on the fence about renting a car (60 Euros for a day). But thank God we did. We drove down to an archaeological site called Nora, which was first settled in the 8th century B.C., dominated variously by the Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Romans and Spanish. It was less than 200 kilometers from North Africa and remnants of North African marble and mosaic designs could be seen in the ruins of a wealthy citizen’s house. We also took a winding drive along the Costa del Sud, a rugged part of the Sardinian coastline that reminded us of California’s Pacific Coast Highway. It was a land of aquamarine bays, jagged, toothy rocks, and lonely, abandoned Spanish watchtowers. I don’t know if many of the other meeting goers were able to get out to the Costa del Sud, but it made me understand why tourists would come here and why Sardinians would be proud of their survivor of an island.

Corniglia was probably the hardest of the Cinque Terre towns to get to. Some of the trains didn’t stop there and you either have to walk up 400 steps or take a stuffy shuttle bus to get from the train station to the center of town. But once you get there, it’s a charming little town. Someone there even had a sense of humor — he or she wrote the word “aeroporto” in chalk with an arrow pointing toward a small look-out point. The narrow stone streets were festooned with flags and, on the day we visited, older women were scattering flowers on the ground. We had apparently stumbled across the flower festival of Corpus Christi. When we returned to Monterosso later, there were elaborate pictures made out of flowers and seeds on the walkways near the main church. It made me wonder whether this is where the idea for Pasadena’s Rose Parade came from.

Monterosso had herds more American college students in mesh running shorts than I’d expected, so it was nice to have our own little slice of quiet at Agriturismo Buranco. The agriturismo was a short walk up a steep, slippery road from the old part of town, but we were soon surrounded by grapevines, olive trees and fuschia flowers. The foccacia they served at breakfast was a revelation — pillowy soft, infused with just the right amount of olive oil. It made the dry stuff we get in the U.S. seem stale and tasteless. We also ate as much pesto as we could since one of the Liguria’s other food contributions to world cuisine is basil pesto. We weren’t ever disappointed. Even though it was raining on our second day there, Meri, our host at Buranco, walked up a tray with snacks and two glasses of their tasty — almost chardonnay-like — white wine. We put Stella to bed and then savored the wine the farm’s covered porch.

The towns of Cinque Terre looked like paintings. We started in Riomaggiore and walked the Via dell’Amore to Manarola, admiring the locks inscribed with the names of lovers fastened onto fences along the way. Manarola was our favorite town, where we could walk out on a little punta and look back to the perfectly framed cascade of pastel-colored houses on the side of the cliff. (Apparently, the colors of the houses in Cinque Terre have to be approved by some commission!) A group of young men with a death wish were swimming right next to a little jetty there. They were lifted and dropped about 10 feet every time a tide pounded in and pulled out. I was worried they’d be thrown against the rocks, but they somehow thought this was fun. I noticed that none of the women seemed eager to join in. We walked up about two-thirds the way up the town to have lunch at Trattoria dal Billy, where we had a commanding view of the poetic Ligurian Sea and fantastically fresh shrimp over homemade pasta. The waiter also entertained our daughter while we finished the meal with a fantastic hazelnut semifreddo and limoncino. We worked off lunch with a walk along the terraced vineyards before descending back down to town.